24 l" .., .,i' ...".' t' 0: ,'" ,,\ .v . 'f; - ::; "'JI" ,... " < ", ,',"" ...... ø " p J \ ^f .. :.. .00:- .- ' " <t ,',' ",.,.', ,... c , " "'\. ,n C). . í'1 f' "c. \f}.. Þ,#, : " "" .j '" ( , '.' i , þ< ( , \ . I . "'" - . . .".:<.: " . i".. '. ',' , " , fl. :. , ,,,,,, ,/I , , " " . , . ... -'. ".." \ '^ ,I '- _.... - -- ^' '^ ,," '"-" < rr. - ,..,$ \'Ç., ", , - ";{ u I'""" -- - , "" / " . " "Hey, Pete, come zn here and get a load of the '58 Chevy." last-a ring of pup tents in a hollow, some aglow, paper-Ian tern-like, with a lamp inside, sume still canvas-white and ghostly, and with a bonfire at the center of the cIrcle-it was b) common agree- Inent that we dropped back and then, cautiously, at first crouching and finally on our hands and knees, began working our way across the field on the small bluff above. \\1 e had been an ordIndry group of boys at the playground, a gang on the trolley; now we were sharpshooters rec- onnoitring the enemy, and when we got to the edge of the field and could look down on the scene below-a few boys, \Vallie among them, sitting around the campfire, others washing their mess kits in the stream that flowed through the hollow or moving about here and there-I think we ali had .a taste of that tight, secret pleasure spies must have, of being the all-seeing, un- suspected witnesses, observing but unob- served. A moment later, we were Indians as-again, as far as I can recall, on a common impulse-we jumped up and ran shrieking down upon them. . . Even now, our intentions, if a bit scatterbrained, were innocent. We were showIng off, of course, and surely we did hope to startle them. But we felt that somehow, beyond all our shouting and so on, we'd be known, we'd be recognized-as on our wildest Hallow- een escapades, for example, beneath our most fantastic disguises, we were recognized in our own neighborhood as just boys on a rampage, and harlnless. This time, though, we weren't. \Ve were outside our neighborhood, to be- gin with; more than that, we hadn't considered the suddenness of our on- slaught and its effect on a bunch of small boys camping out in the lonely dark of the countryside. Nor, I mu t add, had we counted on the timidity of the Scout- master. \Vhat ensued, anyway, went far be- yond anything we could have expected. There was an instant's hush as we burst in, and a startled staring-and then turmoil and confusion, and on such a scale that I can remember it only glancingly: a boy's face flarIng up at mine and then vanishing, and behind him a tent going down and then an- AVCiVST 1 0, 1 9 5 7 , '!- other; a crisscrossing of flash- light beams and a frantic yell- ing; figures leaping and darting across the light of the fire and then past it into the darkness- and then silence and emptiness, in which we were left, aghast, now, ourselves, at the havoc we'd wrought, calling plain- tively "\Vallie! \Vallie!" out into the deepening night. "Lis- W 11 ' .,. , " ten, a Ie, It s Just us. In a minute or two, they all came straggling back. But our adventures were not over yet; instead, from then on, trouble piled on trouble. The boys forgave us at once; indeed-boys are elastic at that age-the whole episode only added a touch of novelty to their night outdoors. The Scoutmaster, though, took a darker view of the proceed- ings. He was a sandy-haired, pale, rather scrawny man, as I remember him, and we figured he must have run farther than the rest at our onslaught, for he was the last to return. \Vhen he did, it was to order us off the place immediately. He was quite justified in that, of course; without mean- ing to, we had acted like a bunch of young ruffians. V\That he failed to tell us was that when he had run away he had made a good job of it. He had run all the way to the farmhoùse on the property and had phoned the Rochester police-and the farmer, pending their arrival, had offered to round up some friends, in a kind of makeshift posse, to come to the rescue meanwhile. \Ve didn't know-we didn't even sus- pect-what a chain of alarm we had waked, out there in the country eve- ning, untIl, shuffling off down the road, depressed and considerably chastened, we ran head on in to the posse, coming toward us. ...1\11 this happened, as I've said, years ago, and I find that, in my own mind, at least) distant memories such as this tend to fall into separate episodes, each one vivid in itself but pretty much iso- lated, so that the whole experience is, so to speak, skeletonized in to a series of dramatic but largely unrelated flashes Thus, I can recall-in that odd, oblIque way In which one figures both as an observer and as a participant-our long, lazy evenings on the playground; I can see us marching through the vil- lage street, with its scattering of white- painted houses; and I can see, and feel, '-